Enjoy the game everyone! I love football and even though my team isn’t in it, I look forward to snacking and yelling at the television as I determine I would know what to do if I had ever actually played in a real game!
Hope you all voted for Casket in the Doritos challenge and as always we’ll be talking about the commercials all afternoon! YAY!
Women are multipliers. We don’t just add to things we multiply them. The funny part about this is that we are also great finger-pointers so while I don’t consider MYSELF a multiplier I can point to each of my friends and say they are. Okay, I’m kidding, I am a multiplier! I tell this to the women of TLC all the time. They laugh but we know it’s true. And men, they nod their heads slightly because they don’t want to get into trouble in case a woman is watching. But let’s be honest we are multipliers. I think it’s that XX chromosome God gave us. After all, the X is the symbol of multiplication and we have two X’s!! Something about it makes multiplication an innate thing!
We take a man’s seed and multiply it into a baby. We make things bigger and different than their original design. Have you ever seen a bachelor’s home? He has a television, a bed, a fridge, a stereo, a computer and a video game console of some sort. He is happy just to be a minimalist. Then he gets married and his wife, the multiplier, is not ever going to be happy with this setup. So she buys a couch and a love seat and a coffee table, lamps and pictures and bedding, towels that match and pots and pans. She buys a dining room set and not just with two chairs, one for each of them, but she sees a future that includes more people sitting at that table. She multiplies everything and makes their house a home. I multiply because that is what I was designed to do. Have you ever noticed that a man’s wardrobe increases significantly if there is a woman in his life? The only thing that seems to diminish is the amount of friends he is allowed to have over at one time! Interesting…..but I’ll move on.
Naturally most women talk more, they worry more, they spend more and this is the part that is not fair, they tend to put on weight easier too! We also make life miserable when we aren’t happy because we multiply the problem. My husband says all the time, if the queen is happy the land is happy. Why? Because we multiply our mood and set the atmosphere for any situation we are in. How? We over-think it all! Which is multiplication! It’s in our nature to multiply.
God said be fruitful and multiply and in this area of our lives, we are just being obedient! Let’s work at being multipliers in a healthy way. Let’s work together to multiply the good in our lives and leave the stuff that doesn’t do us any good behind us. It’s all about balance! Often we go way overboard on negativity and bitterness and resentfulness. Let’s learn to be fair and multiply those things that life hands us in a positive manner. Multiplication is a powerful tool if we use it correctly. In the next few weeks we’ll be talking more about this and how to influence in the right way.
I’m learning so much! We are taking The Love Dare at church. The lessons have been excellent. I’ve learned a lot about myself and the kind of wife I am. On some things I’d grade myself an “A”. On other things I fail miserably. Yet, my husband, week after week loves me anyway.
One phrase that seems to be the resounding cadence of the men in the class is, “It’s Never Good Enough”. Wow! I can certainly see how the snake in the garden of Eden got to Eve and caused her to sin so simply. In her eyes, it simply wasn’t good enough and there was room for improvement. Since in our inner design, we as women are multipliers. I suppose that at our base level we view everything as able to be improved. However, in our saved condition we must learn to be at peace and content.
It has really been a learning experience to hear good men say they feel that they can’t do things right at home, when really the issue is they don’t do the task as their wife does it. It can be something simple like sweeping the floor or something a little more complicated like giving the kids a bath. We women have this idea that we can do it better.
So my resolve is set, my eyes are fixed on the prize and that is to have a husband who feels more than adequate and who really is my partner in life. He’s not perfect, but neither am I so we’ll have to be works in progress together.
As my son Anthony moved out of town 4 hours away, I’ve really been looking back. Now that my daughter Casey has graduated from college and is working and living her adult life about 20 minutes from Anthony, I’ve really been looking back. Time flies so quickly with your children. It seems like yesterday they were babies and now they are grown and off on their own. We talk on the phone, by text and Facebook, but the days of baseball and cheerleading competitions are long gone.
I knew they were only mine for a season. I knew they weren’t really mine forever. I tied them to my apron strings and held them close to my heart and taught them to be good citizens who love God and who are kind productive members of society. Some days were beyond easy and some days were crazy hard but all in all it was good. I loved being a mom. It was truly my greatest job ever. My role is different now but I will be forever blessed to have these two in my life.
If you are a parent, cherish this time with your children. It will be gone before you have time to catch your breath. Whenever I hear this song on the radio I think of what it means to raise a child and how it really is true. Our roots as parents, if they are planted in good soil and tended carefully, will help them find their wings.
There is a concept that we have created in our mind that sins have levels or degrees. Murder, we think, is an ultimate sin which most of us would not commit but lying well, that is a small sin and because everyone does it, it is more likely excusable.
So we judge each other based on what we consider is a more of a sin than the one that we’ve committed. We have categorized sin by degree. Only the problem with this is that sin is sin. There isn’t one that is more offensive than the other. It’s doing something that we know is wrong and just because everyone is doing it doesn’t make it right. We often can justify our sin until that sin is committed on us, then all of a sudden it becomes wrong. In the case of lying, we can say we lied to save feelings but when we are lied to why are we outraged?
Sin is simply defined as rebellion or lawlessness, missing the mark. It means we know something is not right and we do it anyway. The argument then becomes who sets up right and wrong? What if I don’t think it’s wrong? Remember that God set it up and whether you believe in God or not, you can’t deny that it’s basic humanity to live above the law that God set forth. You may not believe that sleeping with a married man is wrong because after all, he’s miserable in his marriage, but when he becomes your husband you’ll have a different perspective when you find out about his new girlfriend. Wouldn’t staying away from him be just the basic common courtesy you would give a fellow human being? You may not think telling a private matter of one girlfriend to another is wrong, until she tells your dirty little secret and then it’s heinous.
Does God forgive everybody? Everyone who asks for forgiveness with a repented heart is forgiven always. Even the most horrible of people and even the things we think we could never forgive a person for God is able to do so. On the surface of things it doesn’t seem fair does it? A person can live their life so horribly and then, finds God, and asks for his forgiveness and gets it. It would seem like God would say no, sorry that is too harsh of a thing to be forgiven for. Only what makes murder with a gun worse than murder with your words? Don’t they both have the same effect? Vicious actions are vicious actions regardless of the tools used. So let’s stop judging motive, see sin for sin and quit excusing our own.
Pastor Susan 